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THE INFLUENCE OF M. GORKYВ’S PERSONALITY AND VIEWS ON THE LITERARY PROCESSES OF LATVIA
Abstract
The present study considers the interrelations between the personality of a socially and politically active writer and literary and cultural processes in the country. To analyse literary processes in a wider historical and cultural context the cultural-historical view on literature was applied; in its turn, to examine the writerВ’s place within the overall cultural milieu and to determine the interaction of the authorВ’s writings and his era the elements of the biographical method were used. In Latvia, the Russian and Soviet writer Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) was well known since the beginning of the 20th century. During the First Russian Revolution (1905-1907) he spent some time in Riga and Jurmala. Before the First World War (1914-1918) he actively corresponded with some Latvian writers; as a result, in 1916, the Collection of Latvian literature was published. M. Gorky was responsible for selection and publication of prosaic texts. In general, M. Gorky was an authority for left-wing writers. When in the 1940s Latvia was annexed within the Soviet Union, to propagate the socialist ideas and further the process of Sovietisation propagandists relied on postulates formulated by M. Gorky. Being a political activist and an implementor of Soviet ideology he emphasized the role of literature in forming and educating the Soviet people and insisted on interrelation of socio-politics and literary texts. Soviet ideologists relied on M. Gorky when instilling and fostering a negative opinion on capitalism in public. The specific focus of the paper is on the influence M. Gorky had on Latvian literary processes before the 1940s and coverage of M. GorkyВ’s personality and views in printed media of Soviet Latvia in the 1940s as precisely at that time, an ideologeme of В‘Rotting WestВ’ was intensively propagated in the society with due regard to M. GorkyВ’s publicist and literary writings.
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